Concurrencies (2008) for Live Multi-Channel Electronics and Viola
Presenters: David Wessel and Nils Bultmann (University of California,Berkeley)

Abstract: This work is a study in musical design patterns inspired by patterns for parallel programming. The synonymous terms—voices, streams, channels, tracks—suggest the highly exposed parallelism in music. If multiple voices are to fuse into a single monophonic line they must be tightly correlated in terms of their pitch and amplitude. On the other hand, polyphony is achieved by asynchrony in the note onsets and a lack of common melodic motion. Other coordination schemes give rise to homophonic and heterophonic textures. The performance of Concurrencies is live and the audio is generated in real-time by Max/MSP. Control is provided by an instrument-like multiple touch pad surface. The device is a product of research on expressive musical interfaces at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies CNMAT at UC Berkeley and was engineered by Rimas Avizienis. Each of the 32 touch pads sense x and y finger position as well as finger pressure.

[http://sc08.supercomputing.org/index.php|SC08] is the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture